Bucharest Journal; It's Mother Nature, Not Ceausescu, Who Relents

By HENRY KAMM, Special to the New York Times

Published: February 18, 1988

BUCHAREST, Rumania, Feb. 11—
An exceptionally mild winter, days on end of spring sunshine instead of the usual leaden skies of February, have brought an air of well-being to Bucharest. It is an illusion.

''Things better?'' a visitor asked a friend. ''No,'' she said. ''Did you expect them to be?'' A dry laugh made clear that she did not.

The fine weather has meant no more than that the miseries of Europe's most deprived nation and the most repressed, according to the State Department's annual human rights report, have for the first time in years not been made worse by the extra hardships of Rumanian winter.

There is still almost no heating in Bucharest's apartments, but at least temperatures have been above freezing. Lighting remains too dim for comfortable reading. It is hard to find bulbs stronger than 30 watts in the stores, and officially a family is supposed to light only one room. Ban on Private Cars Lifted

Only today, after more than a week of warm weather, the Government lifted its ban on the use of private cars. It was put into effect, as in every recent winter, with the first snowfall.

The pretext is that cars would snarl traffic; the reason is that the ban saves gasoline. Rumania exports millions of tons of petroleum products and uses the earnings in convertible currencies to meet President Nicolae Ceausescu's priority goal of ridding the country of foreign indebtedness.

The Government also exports vast quantities of Rumania's bounty of meat, dairy products, cereals and produce. A result has been a drastic reduction of the foreign debt from about $10 billion in the early 1980's to about $5 billion.

Another consequence is that a nation of 23 million people spends an inordinate amount of time in food lines and much of its inventiveness and energy in scheming how to buy food and other necessities under the counter or through backdoors.

''I go to the restaurant,'' a chauffeur said when asked how he got meat for his family. ''I buy the meat at the restaurant, and my wife cooks it.'' Some Stores Do Not Open

Much of the meat and other products allotted to restaurants is never served there. Their staffs sell the goods at the backdoor.

The food lines at the shops, all state-owned, have a conspiratorial air. Often the stores do not even open. The scarce goods are sold at the door, and when the supply is exhausted the door shuts and the disappointed shoppers look for another store at which to line up.

At one shop a saleswoman wordlessly handed a small parcel through the window of a door to each customer as he reached the head of the line. ''Cascaval,'' explained one man taking advantage of the rare occasion to wait behind about 50 others for a small piece of cheese.

At the office of Balkan, the Bulgarian airline, Rumanians do not line up. They crowd around an outside display case. Pencil and pad in hand, they wait until those within reading distance finish taking notes and cede their places. Joys of Bulgarian Television

Rumanians are copying the program listing for the next two weeks of Bulgarian state television. With a good antenna they can receive Bulgarian broadcasts, although few speak the language. As a means of saving energy, Rumanian television is on the air only two hours a night, and a disproportionate amount of the time is devoted to Mr. Ceausescu.

Although Rumanians obviously prize it, many Bulgarians speak disparagingly of their television and say they much prefer to watch the Soviet station, which is beamed into their country. They prefer the new openness from Moscow, which has not yet reached Sofia and seems even farther away from Bucharest.

A pecking order of viewing across national borders has taken hold in Eastern Europe. In Hungary and Poland, many people scorn their national networks in favor of Western satellite broadcasts. Dish antenna kits are privately but openly sold in both countries. East Germans watch West Berlin stations, and many Czechoslovaks and Hungarians are fans of Austrian television.

A block from the airline office, clusters of Rumanians gaze throughout the day across a wide sidewalk at another set of display cases. They are attached to a fence surrounding the office of the United States Information Service and display pictures of American life that the information service puts up at its offices around the world.

But nowhere is the distance between the pictures and the viewers as great as here. To keep their citizens from getting too close to foreign embassies, the sidewalks in front of such buildings are forbidden zones, blocked off and guarded by armed police. Still, Rumanians peer intently across a 20-foot gap to see photos of President Reagan greeting visitors whom they do not know.

To make it easier, the embassy has the captions printed in king size characters. 'Bridge of Misery'

Rumanians are painfully conscious of a change in Balkan rankings exemplified by their predilection for Bulgarian television that has been brought about by their years of hardship. In the past, for reasons neither just nor explainable, Bulgaria had borne the mark of being deemed the most underdeveloped of the five Balkan nations. (A sixth, Albania, is so deeply isolated that no one includes it in the ranking.) Now, however, life is clearly more agreeable in Bulgaria than here.

Because of the many Rumanian shoppers who cross the Friendship Bridge, heavily barbed-wired and guarded on the Rumanian side, to buy Bulgarian groceries in Ruse, on the opposite bank of the Danube, Bulgarians mockingly call it the ''bridge of misery.''

Bulgaria has become a favorite destination for weekend excursions for the fortunate few who are allowed the rare privilege to leave their country even to visit another Communist nation.

A member of a recent group recalled that the shivering passengers rejoiced when the heat was turned on in the train on the Bulgarian side. ''You see how far behind the Bulgarians are?'' said one. ''Twenty years ago, we had heated trains.''